Asklemmy

"Killer feature" is silicon-valley-invrstor-ROI-speak. The fediverse is designed in opposition to central platforms funded by investors looking to make a profit.

I don't want to go back to reddit because they abandoned third party clients and made another few decisions that made me mad. Lemmy today is - objectively speaking - worse than reddit was circa 5-7 years ago. The user numbers aren't the same, the way the fediverse is connected reactions aren't as snappy and the search function is way worse. If I judged this on "killer features" I might be tempted to go back to reddit. I tolerate the shortcomings because I believe centrally operated platforms have a high tendency to enshitify as soon as they realize they need to make money.

My killer feature is I can't be banned for saying Peter Thiel should be turned into soup thrice.

Decentralisation.

I will never use any other kind of social media again.

No ads.

Incredible range of customization and third party app options.

If I need to go on new Reddit for something, I get exhausted by all of their bs very quickly

For me it's the freedom and privacy

I don't need to get spied on and getting banned one place because of automod being dumb (which is rare here vs mainstream places anyway) doesn't mess with my whole account

For me it's API usage for the most part.
When they locked the API, I was even fine with paying a bit, so I subscribed to Relay Pro. But now I got a degoogled phone, so I can't use my play store subscription anymore, and don't want to fiddle with cracked APKs or patching either.
The original reddit app is a nightmare to use so.. that's why I'm here lol

(Freedom, privacy and decentralization are awesome too, obviously. But I'm gonna be honest, I probably wouldn't have switched - at least not fully - if it wasn't for having an app that works well for me.)

for me, it's the niche communities that i used to enjoy on reddit and lemmy has in abundance.

my niche communities on reddit used to follow r/politics, r/socialism, r/chapotraphouse, etc. and lemmy was created by like minded people.

No more AskReddit hornyposting the same questions over and ovet

can't say its one thing with piefed. there are a bunch of options. I would say for the fediverse in general besides the federated nature its the control I have of my experience. filtering and blocking as I decide and if my instance blocks things and im not cool with it I can find an instance that does not block it.

everything i read on reddit not immediately being shunted to the unblinking eye of google

For me, it’s the ability to disable downvotes on a community on PieFed. On Reddit, every time a sub gets popular, discussions just get downvoted into oblivion in favor of memes. There are always certain topics you simply can’t discuss without getting buried.

With this feature, you don’t have to keep splitting a community into smaller and smaller fragments just to have a space where a topic is allowed. Everything gets represented based on how many people actually like the topic, without people who dislike it being able to effectively censor it and prevent others from discussing it. That’s the killer feature for me.